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By Herbert C. Miller
Professor Emeritus of International Business,
IU Kokomo
One faces the future with one's past.-- Pearl S. Buck
 Miller
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Every year during the birthday celebrations for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we are asked to assess our progress as a people and culture towards fulfilling his "dream." As a long-time student of languages and cultures, I am well aware that changes in these areas are slow, difficult, often painful and usually take place across several generations rather than within one. Since people are essentially molded and shaped linguistically and culturally by the time they are 10 or 12, any later learning, even if true and positive, has to contend with and be influenced by the earlier learning, even if false and negative. During these years the basic units of American culture -- language, religion, food and clothing preferences, political and social concepts, values, attitudes towards others, word connotations -- form and shape psyches and subconscious behaviors. Our culture is based largely on English culture.
Five hundred years ago, the English conducted a campaign to vilify and denigrate Africa and Africans in order to justify and rationalize using greater military power to enslave them. Thus, a totally negative, subhuman creature, "the African," was generated and became the target of hostility and hatred in English culture even though the African people had done nothing to the English people to deserve or warrant such attitudes and behaviors. Other countries of predominantly English culture--Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and some Caribbean Islands--generally share these hostile attitudes towards Africans in particular and non-white people in general.
When I made these statements recently to a group of business people, one replied that he could not recall any particular hostility towards black Americans. Of course, he is typical of most white Americans who, unlike black Americans, have not had to face or deal with the hostility from other white Americans. He, like many other white Americans, believe that black Americans, complaining about "cultural" or "systemic" racism, are simply thin-skinned, exaggerating or paranoid. Even the very terms "black" and "white" are not merely neutral descriptors, as they might be in some other countries. Used within the American context, they take on an extremely heavy load of positive and negative cultural connotations. In a similar fashion, the terms "lamb" and "pork" in Saudi Arabia, "Protestant" and "Catholic" in Northern Ireland, "Arab" and "Jew" in the Middle East and "Hindu" and "Moslem" in India carry important, often lethal, emotional significance far beyond their basic meanings.
I pointed out to the businessman that he had grown up in the '30s, when this country was totally and thoroughly segregated by race, and I reminded him that when black Americans tried to get out of their place at the bottom of the society, there indeed was hostility -- violent and vicious hostility -- demonstrated both by private citizens and through public police attacks. Meanwhile, there was the normal, generalized cultural hostility throughout the society. You simply do not deliberately and consciously insult and offend people that you like nor do you discriminate against, segregate out, lynch or enslave them, I said.
In my discussion, I also noted that, until 1994, laws throughout the country stated that anyone with "one-drop-of-African-blood" was officially "African" and therefore subject to the slavery and segregation laws. The segregation laws were in force until 1964, meaning that essentially everyone in the country has been molded and shaped -- directly or indirectly -- by those laws. The laws were intended to insult, humiliate, segregate and exclude native-born black Americans from every aspect of American society and to direct hostility toward them. My business acquaintance, after listening, looked at me a moment and said that he had never even thought about all of that before.
By overlooking or denying reality and the past in our present, we continue to foster an atmosphere in which far too many young, educated people in three-piece suits can comfortably and publicly use the same logic and rhetoric as people in white sheets and hoods or camouflage fatigues as they use the Internet to send messages of hate around the world.
In spite of 30 years of progress, it is still essential that more of those people who are in positions of responsibility and authority develop and display the vision to see beyond the attitudes, beliefs and restrictions of our American culture. They must also develop and display the courage and the leadership to challenge and to break out of the systems and traditions based on those cultural restrictions, and to work for the benefit of the entire community by completely fulfilling the "dream."
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